SFS Announces Rescheduling of Brass Concert

Readers may recall that the annual Holiday Brass concert, scheduled for this past Saturday evening, December 20, was cancelled due to a citywide power outage. Fortunately, the ensemble did not waste any time in rescheduling the event, which will now take place on Sunday, January 11, at 7:30 p.m. As usual, those who have purchased tickets will be able to use them on this occasion; and, if the date and time are inconvenient, they can contact the Box Office (415-864-6000 or patronservices@sfsymphony.org) to arrange for ticket exchange, donation, gift certificate, or refund. Those who have not previously purchased tickets may do so through a Web page or by visiting the Box Office.

The SFS Trumpet section (courtesy of SFS)

The program will not change, beginning with the two arrangements by SFS Principal Trumpet Mark Inouye of movements selected from Handel’s HWV 351 suite Music for the Royal Fireworks and “Bist du bei mir,” an aria from Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel's opera Diomedes. There will also be the two major departures from the holiday spirit, the four-movement Suite from Maria de Buenos Aires, compiled by Steven Verhelst from the score of Astor Piazzolla’s opera Maria de Buenos Aires, and Enrique Crespo’s “Bruckner Etude.” Brad Hogarth will replace Edwin Outwater, who had originally been scheduled to conduct.

Goerne’s Encore Rises Above his Program

Baritone Matthias Goerne (photograph by Caroline de Bon, courtesy of SFP)

Last night baritone Matthias Goerne returned to Herbst Theatre to present the final program in the San Francisco Performances (SFP) 2021–2022 Art of Song Series. This was Goerne’s eighth SFP appearance; and his performances in the Veterans Building also included his serving as an “inaugural artist,” giving the first public performance to take place in the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater in the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera in March of 2016. For last night’s recital, Goerne was accompanied by Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, making his second SFP appearance, following his debut as a solo recitalist in the 2018–2019 Piano Series.

An unofficial casual scan of the audience suggested that more may have shown up for Cho than for Goerne. Nevertheless, this was one of the most attentive audiences that I have encountered in Herbst. My only regret was how little there was to attract and hold attention. The duration of the program was about 75 minutes, performed without an intermission. Goerne made the bold decision to begin with a selection of eight songs by Hans Pfitzner. This was followed by Richard Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, settings of five poems written by Mathilde Wesendonck. The program then concluded with a selection of five songs by Richard Strauss.

This was a program that looked particularly impressive on paper. As I had written in the preview article for this recital, Naxos had recently completed its project to record all of the songs that Pfitzner had composed, making the opportunity to listen to his music in recital particularly timely. Sadly, there was little convincing in Goerne’s effort to give expressive accounts of the songs he had selected, each based on a poem in German by a different author.

The Wagner selection was one of those rare instances in which he composed for just voice and piano. Two of the songs tend to receive more attention, since Wagner explicitly identified them as studies in preparation for his Tristan und Isolde opera. However, “work-in-progress” does not necessarily make for compelling recital material; and Cho seemed out of his depth in the Wagner repertoire, even when the music had been written explicitly for the piano. Equally awkward was the final Strauss selection, “Im Abendrot” (at sunset), one of the Four Last Songs originally composed for soprano and orchestra. This particular song has an extended instrumental epilog, which reflects back on Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration” tone poem; and Cho never managed to capture the spirit of that music through his solo piano skills.

That left the encore selection. “Bist du bei mir” (if you are with me) was composed for Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel’s opera Diomedes. However, it is best known because Johann Sebastian Bach copied it into the 1725 portion of his Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach. While the accompaniment to the vocal line is not particularly sophisticated, Cho was clearly (finally?) in his comfort zone with Bach’s arrangement; and there was a sincerity in Goerne’s delivery that was far more compelling than his approaches to Strauss, Wagner, and Pfitzner.

Salonen’s Richly Disciplined Account of Sibelius

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen presented the first of the two programs he has prepared for the Summer Season of the San Francisco Symphony. This was a basic overture-concerto-symphony program compressed into a 90-minute evening without intermission. The symphony, Jean Sibelius’ Opus 43 (second) in D major, composed in 1902, was decidedly the main attraction. More than a century old, this composition has endured as Sibelius’ best-known and most accessible symphony.

Nevertheless, Salonen brought a freshness to his interpretation resulting in anything but a here-we-go-again account. He clearly grasped every detail of the score with a full appreciation of the composer’s rich palette of sonorities and the often eyebrow-raising contrasts of an individual instrument offsetting the lush texture of a particular section of the orchestra. Most important was his attentiveness to changes in dynamic levels, not just the shock of contrast but also the gradual accumulation of the dynamic level against an ostinato pattern. The overall result was one of a first-time experience, no matter how many times the listener has encountered this music in a concert hall or on recording.

Just as fresh was the concerto offering, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 622 clarinet concerto in A major, with Principal Clarinet Cary Bell as soloists. I first confronted this music when I was in junior high school. I can not even guess how many times I worked my way through the clarinet part. Ironically, last night was my first opportunity to listen to this music in performance, rather than on recordings.

As is the case with his many piano concertos, Mozart’s rhetoric emerges not only through the solo work but also through his judicious approach to the wind resources. In K. 622 those resources are two flutes, two bassoons, and two horns. The absence of oboes is particularly interesting, suggesting that Mozart had given considerable thought to those timbres that would blend best with the clarinet (which, itself, has a different timbre for each of its registers). Salonen seemed well aware of these resource choices, making the relationships established between clarinet and orchestral winds as distinctively imaginative as the unique choices Mozart made for each of his piano concertos.

Bell’s account could not have been more polished. His management of those different registers often evoked the sense that he was playing polyphony. (Presumably, that is what Mozart intended in what he composed, making the most of all those diverse sonorities.) With the marks on paper still deeply etched in my memory, I could tell when Bell was improvising his own embellishments; and his rhetoric was consistently engaging. Unless I am mistaken, the score provides only one cadenza opportunity; but it was clear that Bell was just as comfortable playing with those marks on paper as he was with interpreting them faithfully.

1723 copy of Stölzel’s “Bist du bei mir” aria from his Diomedes opera (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The “overture” was a brief (less than five minutes) setting of an aria from the opera Diomedes, whose full score has been lost. Johann Sebastian Bach copied the melody and bass lines of this aria into the second notebook he compiled for his second wife, Anna Magdalena. When the original Bach-Gesellschaft publication was first compiled, this piece was taken to be Bach’s own composition; and Wolfgang Schmieder numbered it BWV 508 in his catalog. However, the composer was actually Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (whose last name appears with a question mark in the second, “new,” complete works edition). The original Stölzel manuscript was only discovered in 2000, long after the twentieth-century conductor Otto Klemperer prepared an orchestral arrangement of this music, which opened last night’s concert. Klemperer filled in the voices between the two Bach had notated for his wife, scoring the piece for string ensemble. Salonen’s attention to the intimate song-like qualities of this music provided just the right “curtain-raiser” for the concerto and symphony to follow.

A "Debut Recital"

Having seen Sheri Greenawald, Director of the San Francisco Opera Center, "in action" giving a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I suspect she would forgive (if not sympathize with) me for beginning by shamelessly ripping off Jane Austen: It is "a truth universally acknowledged" that any aspiring vocalist (not to mention the seasoned ones) "must be in want of" good recital opportunities. As she explained after yesterday's intermission at Temple Emanu-El, the Schwabacher Debut Recital Series is run (under the auspices of the San Francisco Opera Center) to serve that truth. From my own point of view, this series is particularly important because, where matters of performance are concerned, a vocal recital is a significantly different beast from an opera; and any vocalist serious about making a career must be prepared to excel in both environments.

The difference between the two has less to do with repertoire than with scale. A recital does not belong in the "grand" space of today's large opera houses. If it has been set there, then the motives have more to do with selling lots of tickets than serving the music on the program. The recital is the "moral equivalent" of chamber music for vocalists. In the absence of the proper "chamber," neither music nor performer is well served. The best vocal recitals I can remember were experienced at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, and Greenawald is fortunate that Temple Emanu-El has an auditorium on a comparable scale. All this should be taken as a preface to considering the recital that soprano Heidi Melton gave yesterday afternoon with John Parr as her accompanist.

Melton is a current Adler Fellow at the San Francisco Opera, and she has already made much of her tenure in that position. Most importantly she had the privilege of creating the role of Mary Todd Lincoln last fall in Appomattox, which meant, among other things, that hers was one of the first (and last) voices we heard in this still-memorable premiere. She has also sung the role of Marianne, Sophie's duenna, whom we hear only briefly in the second act of Rosenkavalier but whom we hear negotiating those breathless passages that Richard Strauss composed so well as the two of them anticipate the rose-bearer's arrival; and, during that same spring season she sang the disembodied voice of Diane, who resolves all the plot tensions in Iphigénie en Tauride. (Given the way I felt about the staging of this opera, being disembodied may have had some advantages.) All of these roles demand a strong and clear voice that can establish a well-defined presence in a space like the War Memorial Opera House; and Melton did not fall short in any of them.

However, the reason for my extended preface is that the Temple Emanu-El auditorium is a far cry from the War Memorial Opera House. Having established her "street creds" at the latter, Melton still has a bit more to do with the former. Thus, to stick with the music of Strauss, for all the Sturm und Drang in "Frülingsfeier" (both Strauss' music and the text itself by Heinrich Heine), this is not the final scene from Salome; and its performance requires a more attenuated intensity to deliver the right impact in a chamber setting. Similarly, Melton did not seem to find the right level of intimacy for a Strauss setting as sensitive as "Meinem Kinde," even though I fully believed her introductory remarks about how much this song meant to her at a personal level.

To be fair, Melton set herself some serious challenges in selecting her program. Wrestling with Arne Garborg's Norwegian texts for Edvard Grieg's Haugtussa ("Mountain Maid") song cycle without also having to take on questions of how to approach Grieg at all (which I had been struggling with, in my own modest ways, about a year ago). Particularly in light of the specific texts, it is no easy matter to get beyond Michael Flanders' old "more sherbet than Schubert" quip and tap into the "cultural bedrock" of this music (the motivation behind Robert Mann's advice about understanding a composer by understanding his folk music). As I had written, the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer eventually helped me find that bedrock; and it would not surprise me to learn that Melton may still be prospecting.

Similarly, the Grieg was preceded by beginning the program by skating onto thin ice (an appropriate metaphor for Grieg's Norwegian influence). Johann Sebastian Bach was listed as the composer; but, on the basis of current scholarship, this was true of only the third of the songs performed, "Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen." The second, "Bist du bei mir," was by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel; and both of these songs are included in the 1725 Klavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach. The first, "Komt, Seelen, dieser Tag," like the third, is from a Pietist hymnal edited by George Christian Schemelli; however, in this case current thinking is that Bach took his melody from some other source, rather than composing his own. The Pietistic movement in German Protestantism involved a very personal and expressive declaration of faith. Putting aside the question of how appropriate this was for the auditorium of a synagogue, they provide a good example of that lack of "attenuated intensity," since, however overtly expressive these hymns may be, their level of expression is definitely not that of the nineteenth-century opera house!

Melton was much more in her comfort zone after the intermission, with art songs by Johannes Brahms and Strauss, as well as a "cabaret assortment," which included Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, and Benjamin Britten. The Britten, set to a text by Wystan Hugh Auden, was probably the most effective, particularly with a concluding gesture of staging that involved accompanist Parr. I have a personal affection for Weill's setting of Bertolt Brecht's "Barbarasong," composed for Die Dreigroschenoper, since it provides such a sharp-edged reflection on just-say-no morality. Still, that edge requires scrupulous dramatic attention to each successive delivery of "Nein" in the text that I felt was missing in this particular performance.

Having laid my critical cards on the table, I should conclude by observing that this was a Debut Recital Series. As I have already observed, Melton set some major challenges for a "first time out" offering; and, had she not selected the composers she did, I might not have been drawn to her recital in the first place. Thus, while she is far from the student performers about whom I wrote on Saturday, hers is still very much a world of the "lifelong learning" I cited in that post. Therefore, I shall continue to follow her progress at the San Francisco Opera at my same level of enthusiastic appreciation and would be only to happy to hear her next recital to take stock of her personal learning experiences.